Parking in a tight spot

The Volvo system … lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.
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This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment.